


Morning in the Burned House

by Saucery



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Big Brother is Watching, Constructed Reality, Dark, Disorentation, Dream-Hacking, Dreams, Dreamwalking, Espionage, First Meetings, Flirting, Fragmented Narrative, Government Agency, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Insanity, M/M, Memories, Mindfuck, Murder Fantasies, Nightmares, Origin Story, Paranoia, Partnership, Pre-Slash, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Violence, Psychological Trauma, Psychology, Pyromania, Reality Lag, Romance, Snark, Special Agent Arthur, Superpowers, Surreal, Unreliable Narrator, When Arthur Met Eames
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 10:08:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1895082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saucery/pseuds/Saucery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dark alternate universe in which Eames is not only a forger, but a psychic, forever teetering on the edge of madness. The city of Los Angeles stretches around him, writhing with dreams, and he can't shut them out.</p><p>Then, he meets Arthur, a government agent with an unlikely solution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morning in the Burned House

**Author's Note:**

> The title is shamelessly pilfered from Margaret Atwood's eerie, brilliant poem, _[Morning in the Burned House](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/morning-burned-house)_.

* * *

 

"What is known as a dream-walker," says the priest, his face smoke-hazy, "is a trickster, a devil, a thought-stealer."

"Yeah, ta very much. That's a whole lot of help." Like Eames doesn't already know what he is.

The priest's features flicker; they belong to a forty-year-old woman, now, and Eames knows with flawless certainty that she is exactly forty, and has three sons, one of whom is dead, but isn't, to her. That very child appears next to Eames, a sudden presence of blood-scent and fabric softener and blind adoration, and he won't have any eyes if Eames looks at him, so he doesn't. It's all a load of shite, anyway.

"I am sorry," says the priest, through the woman's face. "I cannot help you."

"How'd you help yourself, then?"

"There was a match," the priest says. "I lit myself."

"Wonderful."

"You will soon descend into the fire. Be not afeared; you will consume it."

"Why, thank you, Caliban. I get it. The isle is full of noises, and whatnot." Eames tips his head up; it's starting to rain, from the starless sky, and the fire goes out in a puff of steam.

The priest's gone. The woman's gone. Only the child remains, gentle, eyeless, drawing circles in the dirt.

"Bugger this for a lark," says Eames, and vanishes.

 

* * *

 

So, this is brilliant. Even the guidance counselors of yonder - the other dream-walkers - want him to burn things. And he'd thought the pyromania was all him.

It'll be a relief, he thinks, to finally snap and go postal on everybody. To satiate his growing appetite for explosives. Rocket-propeled grenades. Home-made bombs. Fucking Molotovs, _anything_. Anything to burn it all down to a silent sift of ash, quiet all around him: sleeping faces, roasted and charred, skin curling off the ripe-fruit red of them like the most delicate black parchment, disintegrating at a touch. Bodies, bodies everywhere. Swollen and shiny, rolling around like pomegranates in the fucking garden of paradise, in which Eames will sing, like a bird, in the glass-clear silence. It'll be perfect. Like a church. Eames will sit among the pews of silent sleepers and send his thanks up to a merciful god. Because god is only merciful when he smites your enemies. Amen.

Years of jitters, years of doing dope and crack and whatever the hell he can get his hands on to shut them all the fuck up, and he wonders why he's even trying, anymore. Trying not to go crazy, trying to fix this, like it's something that can be fixed, the constant drilling of this goddamn screwdriver into his head, other people's dreams, claustrophobic nightmares, little ticky-boxes of terror that sit inside Eames' head like abandoned suitcases on a runaway train, and wait for just the right moment - just as soon as he's asleep - to go 'boom'.

Well, not all the dreams are bad. But the worst ones are the ones that start out good, and end different. He can tell right away, when those ones happen, because they start off all golden and warm with an undercurrent of cool rip-tide, a subliminal tug of movement beneath the surface, like a cold hand around a swimmer's ankle that slowly gets colder, and in the safe kitchens and open backyards little splinters begin to appear - fathers turning carnivorous, loving sisters becoming harpies with bloodied strings of tissue in their beaks, children falling off the mini-diving boards of their inflatable swimming pools and dashing their tiny skulls against the rocks.

He wants to end it all.

He can't bear to.

It's worth it, sometimes. There's some good in there - great sex, for one - scary sex, occasionally, but not always. There are places where the golden warmth stays warm, stays golden, where the children get off their swings and go home, where the woman kisses her beloved and all he does is run a broad palm down her back, where the close clasp of a mother's embrace never gets any tighter, and where the heat of a throat envelops him with exquisite tenderness, like a lover's would, and never hurts him, never. It's.

It's not enough.

"Hey," says somebody, and Eames jerks his head up - looks around him - it's a damned supermarket, and he's standing there with a basket full of Cheerios and beer.

He isn't dreaming. The girl that just spoke to him is in her teens, all subtle punk, the way she's streaked her hair and those earrings, god, her girlfriend must _love_ tugging on them. With her teeth.

"Your change, sir?" she asks him, like he's a moron.

He blinks down at the counter; a couple of quarters glitter on its surface, reflecting the blazing tube-light like a constellation of blinding, miniature suns.

Three things occur to Eames, all at once:

He's still holding his basket.

He still hasn't bought the stuff; it isn't in a handy plastic bag.

This girl should not be offering him change.

"Sir, I'm asking you to collect your change," the girl says, and her teeth are sharper than before. The coins are sinking into the counter, as if burning right through it, but not like suns - like pools of acid. Flames lick up along the corners of them, dark tongues. Coquettish mouths.

Fuck. He's dreaming. He's still -

 

* * *

 

He wakes up, staggers to the bathroom, and throws up.

 

* * *

 

Two days and counting, and he hasn't gone back to sleep. He's out of beer.

He doesn't go anywhere to buy it.

 

* * *

 

When he shows up for the night-shift, the other workers look at him like he's a junkie or a psycho-in-waiting, which, heh, isn't far off the mark. It's a miracle that he's even managed to drive to the factory without crashing his trashy car into a pole or a hydrant; he's creaking under the weight of what feels like unending insomnia, and he's twitchy, jacked up on stimulants to keep him awake, to keep him quiet, _in_ the quiet, for a bit longer. Just a bit longer. One more day. One more day without dreams, and he'll -

" _¿Qué onda, güey?_ " Perez, the shift supervisor, gapes at him. "Your eyes look like they've been punched out, man."

"I'm fine," mumbles Eames, and heads over to the stacks. No heavy lifting, yeah. Not with what he's on. Good thing he's taken a lightweight job, a simple job, taping things and packaging things and watching his hands move through cellophane, distant as fish in an aquarium, clumsy behind a pane of glass.

He's been working night-shifts longer than he can remember. Better to work at night and sleep during the day, when there are fewer dreams, fewer sleepers. It's quieter, then. Marginally. Except for the old minds, in retirement homes, grown vicious and weary with habit - or the young ones, in hospitals and school nurseries and crack-dealing hotspots, open and unpredictable and centrifugal, like whirlwinds would be, if they were made of horrors.

Well. It's quieter. Relatively.

After he signs off and gets back in his car, he considers taking more stims from the dashboard, then decides to get breakfast, first. There's a tidy diner beside the laundromat; it opens earlier than anything else on his block, except for the tacky newspaper-and-porn stand, which never closes, anyway. Eames is almost sure the bloke working there is some kind of pimp, or maybe just a front-man for a certain sort of business. A decade or so ago, a newly-orphaned Eames might've himself been one of the 'live-action' pornographic materials on sale - but things are different now that he's bigger and broader and can work in factories, so that's all right. Doesn't make him as much money, admittedly, but it's not like Eames expects to save up for a grand retirement, at the rate he's going - doing drugs and alcohol and letting his pathetic body soak it all up until it falls apart, like one of those tired old sponges in kitchen basins.

One more day. He'll give himself one more day. He'll sleep after that.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up on a charcoal floor.

Linoleum's melted onto the singed carpet, burned right through to the boards in large patches, leaving the floor looking mangy and infected, like the back of a sick dog.

A barely indistinguishable pattern of wood nymphs curls along the heat-faded scrap of wallpaper next to Eames's face; it drifts, a sole leaf in the chill wind.

Of course it's chill. The roof's gone, now. Or almost gone. Nothing but white sky above him, wiped clean, and the silence. The silence he's wanted for so long.

Eames sits up, feeling a slow jolt of shock run through him - a familiar, bone-deep ache, because he _knows_ this place. The wallpaper. The linoleum. The exact shape of this emptiness.

It's been fourteen years since Eames last saw this house. Fourteen years, eight months, and three days. His mind hands the number to him, like an eager secretary, and he smiles.

It's beautiful, the pale silence, as much as it is horrifying. He'd wept here, once. Dragged his nails along the floorboards. Retched.

"I'm dreaming," he says, wondering at it - _he's_ dreaming, and not somebody else's dream. His own. From his own memory.

"Yes," answers a voice, and Eames turns.

There's a man standing behind him, in a perfectly-pressed suit and polished shoes, holding a briefcase, looking every inch the court clerk. A skinny little bloke with a pencil-pusher's face - the face of a square, fine-featured and pretty enough, but dull.

The eyes are nice, though. Dark eyes. Calm.

And the waistcoat, well. It adds a _very_ nice touch. Perhaps there's a certain appeal to all that neatly-packaged repression.

The man sets down his briefcase, and suddenly, the entire scene seems so strangely reminiscent - the suit, the wasteland, the befuddled dreamer - that Eames grins. The only thing missing is the red pill, really.

"Why, hello, Agent Smith," says Eames, and the man's mouth opens automatically.

"Mr. Anderson," he says - then looks surprised, then discomfited, then impressed. "Please, don't put words in my mouth."

Ah. So he's familiar with inception. "Did I do that?"

"Don't play coy, either."

"But that's what I do, darling." Eames leans back on his hands, like a boy at the beach looking up a girl's skirt, nursing thoughts inappropriate for public spaces. "Surely you know that, whoever you are."

The man inclines his head; his calm has returned, like an ever-present mist upon a deep, still sea. "My name is Arthur."

"Arthur. So nice to have a guest, at long last. Usually, I'm the one that gets dragged along to other people's parties. Gate-crashing isn't nearly as fun if it's involuntary."

"So I gather." The accent is educated, North American, but not precisely upper-class. The fondness for suits is a fondness for better things, perhaps. A bright mind, overcoming dark circumstances. An erstwhile scholarship student, then. Berkeley? Harvard? Probably with a gorgeous, coffee connoisseur of a girlfriend. The ladies do love over-achievers. But then - Eames drags his eyes up that well-fitted waistcoat - so do the gents.

"Do I have you to thank for this scenic trip down memory lane?" And Eames is grateful, to have something of his own again, away from the shit-storms of other people's lives, but perhaps Arthur misunderstands, because his brow twitches.

"I'm sorry. I - we have done extensive research on you. It seemed that this... incident... would be likely to act as a focal point in your psyche, and given how difficult it is to isolate you from the dreams of others, we believed that this memory would be the most effective insulation, in order to stabilize your mind and establish a connection."

 _We_. The word is vaguely disappointing. "Research, hm?" Eames murmurs, and studies the angle of the shadow Arthur's cuff casts on his inner wrist. Sharp as a paper-cut.

Arthur gestures towards the briefcase. "Please," he says, "open it. It contains every file we have on you, classified or unclassified. I offer it to you as a show of good faith."

"Shows of good faith are entirely meaningless without parameters, my dear. There is no guarantee that these are _all_ the files you have on me."

"I could let you into my mind," Arthur says, quietly.

Ah. Such a very pretty offer, and yet... "You think I'd believe that your mind isn't capable of subterfuge, either? Agent Smith?"

Arthur falls silent.

"Oh, for heaven's sake. I'll read them later, if you want me to. The sodding files." Eames rolls his shoulders, his neck. "Sit down, though. Peering up at you is giving me a crick in the bloody neck, and I'd rather not suffer through one of those unless it's for a far more pleasurable reason."

Arthur - doesn't blush. It feels like a near thing, though, given the way he stiffens, and then - after surveying the dirty, ash-strewn floor with something too polite to be disdain - sits down. With his legs crossed. There is a habitual ease in the position, which -

"You meditate, don't you?"

"It's a necessity, in my profession."

"And what is your profession? I know that you're an agent, but an agent of... what?"

"Of dreams." A strange, rueful smile - startlingly lovely - flits across Arthur's face. "I am an Anchor. I must be bound to a Drifter."

Eames hasn't heard those terms before, but their meanings are self-evident. "Allow me to guess. You've been sent to, ah, 'secure' me?"

"To ask you to join us, yes. We can - we can offer you silence. Dreamless sleep. In exchange for partnering with me and accompanying me on missions of extraction and inception."

"You're offering to close the floodgates. For, what, the sake of my sanity?" Eames lets his eyes dip, in that lazy, comfortable way that he knows implies a degree of menace. "And do you think that'll fix me? Make me less crazy? Less likely to kill someone?"

"No," says Arthur, eventually. "But you _haven't_ killed anyone."

Eames barks out a laugh. He doesn't mean to; it just scrapes his way out of him, raw as a wound, filled with old puss and rotten to the core. "So you say. You've done your research. You know about this house. Tell me, what happened here?"

The walls around them waver, but hold. Arthur looks uncomfortable in the way someone looks uncomfortable when they must intrude on another's misery. Or, worse, when they're invited to. "Your family - died."

"Died." Eames's mouth twists; he knows it's an ugly expression, but right now, he doesn't care. "How?"

"They..."

"They burned alive. Each one of them. My brother, my father, my mother and my younger sister. Evie. The skin melted off her in the flames. They found - "

"Mr. Eames - "

"They found her like that. They couldn't - couldn't save her, although she was the only one alive when they - "

"Mr. Eames."

"Who set the fire?"

"Your... your mother did. But - "

"But what? I wasn't responsible, just because I happened to be somewhere else - in a madhouse they put me in? I wasn't responsible, even though I planted the idea in her mind?"

"You didn't mean to. It was the first documented case of involuntary inception. A sign of overwhelming talent - "

"Talent. _Talent?_ That's what you - "

"You... were going mad. You were inundated by the dreams, nightmares and hallucinations of others; you couldn't sleep without becoming someone else, without dreaming someone else's dreams. You had no control over your Drifting. You didn't even know what it was."

"Oh, I knew. I just didn't know what to do about it."

"Exactly. You were helpless." Arthur takes a deep breath, and fixes Eames with a deep, searching look - a serious look, so earnest and fucking honest that it makes Eames want to _hurt_ him, just to make it stop, to make Arthur look at him like - like his parents had. "Mr. Eames. Your family thought you were psychotic. They didn't believe you."

"They tried to _save_ me - "

"By dosing you on more anti-psychotics than are recommended for most _adults_. You were almost catatonic. You - "

"I was the son of the bloody British ambassador, what could you expect? I was a political liability, a - a - "

"You were their son. They should not have abandoned you. Your siblings loved you, but were frightened by you. Your father despised you. Your mother - "

"Don't - "

"Your mother couldn't care less. She was an alcoholic, driven to despair by your father's affairs. He didn't think _they_ were a political liability - "

"Stop - "

"And in your dreamtime journeys, you stumbled upon her mind. All you wanted was silence; little did you know that your thirst for it would plant a seed in her mind, a mind already unstable and warped by self-hatred. Little did you know that, a few days later, she would seek to silence her own demons - her husband, her children - in a fire that would consume your home."

"I killed them."

"No." Arthur's eyes are calm, so damnably calm. "You did not."

Eames breathes; that's about all he can manage, at the moment, and the memories... seem unbelievably distant, even here, in the very house they belong. He needs to stop talking about them. Thinking about them. And he has a charming young man to distract him; it's remiss of him, really, to let himself brood. Not unless he has a Molotov to throw at something. "How," he asks, instead, "can you offer me silence?"

Arthur shifts. His rests his hands on his knees, palms up, in a perfect lotus position. "Through me."

"My dear, I'm truly flattered, but I don't believe astonishingly athletic sex with you will exhaust me to that extent."

Arthur's expression is sour. Delightfully sour.

"Mm. No?"

"No."

"That's unfortunate. Disastrous, even. How, precisely, are you an Anchor?"

"I do not dream."

Eames stares at him. "What?"

"I do not dream."

"Everyone dreams. _Monkeys_ dream."

"I don't."

"Are you a sociopath?"

Arthur blinks. "No," he says. "I do, in fact, have an overwhelmingly strict moral code."

"That you'd kill for?"

Arthur doesn't say anything.

"Oh... my. You _are_ a sociopath."

Arthur sighs. "Mr. Eames - "

"No, no, I find that devastatingly attractive. Do go on."

"I don't dream. My mind is... quiet."

"Sociopathic."

Arthur looks at him.

"Sorry. Continue."

"I need to keep it quiet while I'm awake - hence the meditating - but I seem to lack the natural ability to dream. I should, by rights, be clinically insane - "

"Or sociopathic? No, wait, psychopathic. Not that I'm entirely sure which - "

"Mr. Eames," says Arthur, and Eames spares a moment to marvel at how beautifully _patient_ the man is, "please, don't pretend that you haven't read every book on psychology that you could find. Several times over. And that you don't already know that dreaming - or the lack of it - has little to do with the diagnosis of either sociopathy or psychopathy."

Eames - there is no other word for it - gapes at him.

"Never pretend ignorance with me."

Beautiful. "Have sex with me."

"No. As I was saying, I have failed to display the usual signs of mental instability that might be statistically - and atavistically - expected in a non-dreamer. Instead, I have the special ability to create and maintain a sleep-state that is both aware and dreamless."

"A waking dream that isn't a dream."

"Yes. A non-dream."

"And you'll... grant me shelter. In it. In you?"

Arthur smiles. Not rueful at all, this time. "Yes."

"Yes," Eames echoes, dumbly, stunned by that smile. It's transforming, to say the least, and obviously not sociopathic, unless, of course, Arthur's a very convincing actor... He shakes himself. "That - and you're - not concerned about your privacy?"

The man looks at him like he's ridiculous. "This world is full of Drifters, both trained and untrained, sane and insane. You might be the most powerful one yet, Mr. Eames, but I have no illusions that my dreams - if I had any - wouldn't be there for the taking. By anyone that happened past."

"You don't shield yourself?"

Arthur raises an eyebrow. "I have nothing to shield."

Well. That's - that's certainly something, and Eames is almost terrified to believe in it, to believe that what he's longed for all his life is here, finally here, in the form of this strict, slender man.

Silence.

 _Silence_.

He wants.

He _wants_ -

"What," Eames rasps, his voice dry, his dream-hands suddenly shaking, "will you have me do?"

"Nothing that results in active harm to other people."

Like that's an assurance. "What about passive harm?"

"No harm is truly passive, Mr. Eames."

"You're not answering my question."

"I'm amazed that you still have a conscience. That you're still able to call on it, after all you've been through. Clearly, despite your own beliefs, you never were, nor will you ever be, a killer."

"Answer. The. Question. Arthur."

"We will have you enter people's dreamscapes and tell us what you see, so that you might assist us in extracting or implanting ideas that may - "

" - cause mothers to burn their houses down, with their children still in them?"

"No. We only focus on criminals and threats to national security that would do greater harm if they were _not_ stopped."

"Are you a law-keeping agency?"

"For certain definitions of the terms 'law' and 'agency', yes."

"You're absolutely determined not to provide me anything remotely acceptable as an answer."

"You can do a lot of good, Mr. Eames. Is that an acceptable answer?"

"You're doing _good_. Is that what you tell yourself?"

Arthur rears back. Clenches his jaw. "You're... just as stubborn as your file said you were."

"Again, I'm flattered. I'll be even more flattered when you have sex with me."

"No. Mr. Eames, I believe you know enough to make an informed decision."

"For certain definitions of the words 'informed' and 'decision'?"

Arthur _growls_ -

Oh. Not that patient, after all. But still beautiful. Even more beautiful. "Do I get to decide? Am I going to wake up at all, if I disagree?"

"We don't actually kill anyone, Mr. Eames."

"Actually. Is a dream actual? Do you kill people in dreams?"

"Only their projections. Mr. Eames - "

"Yes."

Arthur inhales sharply.

"Yes, Arthur. I accept."

Arthur unclenches his hands; Eames takes note of them, and wonders when he'd clenched them, at all. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Please. I haven't done anything. I've only roamed the streets, doing small-time jobs and going slowly insane. And, if I don't regret this decision in the short- or the long-term, I believe _I_ will be thanking _you_."

"I." Arthur swallows. His throat is distracting, but so is the look of - gratification? Relief? - on his face. It's definitely some variety of powerful emotion. "I will. I will do my best to ensure that you do not regret it."

"Well, good. When will I be able to sleep without dreaming?"

"As soon as you join us. Tomorrow, at four in the afternoon, you'll find a man named Yusuf waiting for you at the entrance to the Dunbar Hotel."

"My factory job - "

" - is no longer required."

No longer _required_. Right. "I don't know whether to be desperately relieved or to wonder whether I've finally started hallucinating a solution to all this."

Arthur gets up and stands over him again. "You'll stop wondering," he says, "tomorrow."

"Will I?" He's been on fire for so long...

And Arthur's eyes are so kind. "Wake up, Mr. Eames," he says, and reaches out to touch Eames. To touch his face, and it's -

Silence.

The walls bulge inwards, as if under an unimaginable weight of water.

Eames closes his eyes, and lets it put the fire out.

 

* * *

**fin.**

**Author's Note:**

> Like my writing? Want updates? Follow me on [Tumblr](http://saucefactory.tumblr.com/)!


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